Michael Edson is the Smithsonian Institution’s Director of Web and New Media Strategy, and spoke about change and different cultures within organizations, and gave ideas of how to bridge the gap between the two. Here are my rather random notes from his talk:

Empowering citizen scholars – goal at the Smithsonian

What environments will we need to make new ideas happen?

Cultural institutions have millennials, and have older, more traditional staff – …

Chris Anderson – he’s received two strong reactions to his book “Free” – Huh? and Duh! Younger people had the Duh moment – of course that makes sense. Older people had almost a hostile reaction – they didn’t get it.

There’s tension there, and we need to move past it.

Issues:

complacency. We have existed for hundreds of years…

Urgency – we need to build a sense of urgency in these complacent institutions in order to grow a sense of change

We need to find a model that helps us drive change

the most interesting ecosystems are in border habitats between technology and content – we should not treat them separately

What is our work, and how should we do it? At those discussions should be things like mobile internet issues, 2.0 stuff, continually growing and adapting, etc.

Asked visitors to the Smithsonian if they have ever used the Smithsonian’s website – no, they haven’t.

Ex – Google search on oceans – wikipedia, ocean.com, discovery education (discovery channel), NASA of all things, etc all come up in the first page of search results. But the Smithsonian is more like result #66 – even though they do a ton of ocean research.

point – Smithsonian doesn’t have a big reach with something they think is important to them.